Thomas Quasthoff's concert series at the Barbican came to end with glorious
singing from him, Ian Bostridge, Angelika Kirchschlager and Dorothea
Roschmann. Rating: * * * *

For the past year that tremendous bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff has been the focus of his own concert series at the Barbican. This was the final event, which Quasthoff might have seized as the moment to be exclusively centre-stage. Instead, in a nice gesture of collegial modesty, he brought together a few friends for a cosy evening of "songs around the hearth". Together with soprano Dorothea Roschmann, mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager and tenor Ian Bostridge, he performed three of Schumann's song-cycles written for several voices and piano.

These are rarely heard, for the obvious reason that four world-class voices are a lot more expensive than one. And the flame of Schumann's genius doesn't burn as brightly here as it does in his immortal single-voice song-cycles. But as this concert proved, they contain wonderful things.

Two of them had the word 'Spanish' in the title, but frankly the Spanish flavour was very fleeting – just the odd bolero rhythm and occasionally an emphatic ending suggestive of a brusque guitar chord and a senorita turning disdainfully on her heel. What these songs really portray isn't Spain, it's the safe domestic space of the German middle classes of the mid-19th century, with their coy coquetry, their tendency to mingle religious sentiments with romantic ones (all those trysts looking up at the stars!), and their air of fluttering feminine sensitivity.

It's a remote world, but these four made it engaging, partly through sheer seductiveness of sound. The very first song, with Roschmann and Kirchschlager warbling in intertwined melodic lines, was delicious enough to make your head spin. And in between the waltzes and strolls in the moonlight, there were songs that showed the undercurrents of anxiety and sadness behind the bourgeois façade. Dorothea Roschmann struck a thrillingly intense note in the song Melancholy, which just for a moment hinted at something genuinely tragic.

Even in this starry company, Roschmann stood out as something special. By comparison Kirchschlager seemed more conventionally "beautiful". Ian Bostridge, lucky man, had the most heavenly song of the evening, Mein schoner Stern! (my lovely star), and he floated its rapt lines with perfect control.

Meanwhile Quasthoff sat off to one side, beaming like the amiable uncle at a family gathering, occasionally throwing in a massively authoritative song. On the other side were the two pianists Helmut Deutsch and Julius Drake. Whether playing separately or together, they were the ideal accompanists, alert and sensitive but never precious.